The Problem with David Petraeus Talking to the Taliban

Much has been made of the new "talks to end the war in Afghanistan" as General David Petraeus "rewrites the playbook in Afghanistan." The King of Counterinsurgency has shelved his nation-building effort to broker a near-term peace accord with Hamid Karzai, say the journalists fed information by the very man who's given up on Karzai, ambassador Karl Eickenberry. (Or so says Bob Woodward.) And while informed observers are quick to note that U.S. armed forces are still laying it on thick — with real success, it now appears — not enough has been made of the dangerous game Petraeus is playing for the long term. It's a bet that could end up putting U.S. arms back in the hands of a new wave of terrorists.

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So let's be honest about a couple things here. First off, just because NATO is shuttling Taliban leaders to Kabul for what Petraeus calls "preliminary" non-negotiations doesn't mean this rush to seeming diplomacy is shocking or even new. "The talks have been going on for a while," a State Department official told me on Wednesday. "Since Petraeus arrived, the strategy shifted. He unleashed the Special Forces guys and opened channels for negotiation, as he did in Iraq."

And while Petraeus knows how to play nice, we're just seeing a shift in emphasis right now to balance competing short-term interests. "There had been some distance between State and CENTCOM on this, with the military strategy being pound then talk," says David Gordon, the former director of policy and planning at the State Department and now director of research at Eurasia Group, a political-risk consultancy. "But I think the military has accommodated both Karzai and the White House view that negotiations were going to happen, and have shifted to pound and talk." Hillary isn't the only one the general's trying to keep just happy enough to go on pounding: If Karzai gets even the flimsiest of deals with the flimsiest of Taliban groups, it looks good for several upcoming deadlines — Obama needs the troops to actually start coming home in time for his re-election campaign, and NATO has a chip after committing to a handover to Afghan forces in 2014, which is conveniently when Karzai should get the boot in the next vote there. That should give Petraeus just enough time to use Karzai as a wedge between the Taliban leadership in Pakistan and local commanders in Afghanistan.

But therein lies the problem: By keeping everyone in Afghanistan happy, David Petraeus is perverting other, more important allegiances in the region. By playing hardball now, the United States is going to have to buy off Pakistan (again) in a big way, and that's the unspoken deal-making process that's already begun in high-level State Department meetings with senior Pakistani officials. People I talk to around Washington expect those talks to ultimately yield a lot more aid for the recently flood-ravaged nation, along with a major arms deal to placate the true-powers-that be, the Pakistan Army. Because without our weapons in hand, Pakistan's military chief of staff, General Ashfan Parvez Kayani, won't call off the Inter-Services Intelligence, which continues to train and support terrorist networks for operation in both India and Afghanistan — these guys all but set up the Mumbai attacks.

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As a result, about the only group that wins here is the U.S. defense industry, which, despite a shrinking military budget in the U.S., now gets to sell Pakistan all manner of hardware to counterbalance similar major-league sales to India. (The current Obama deal on the table — to be signed next month when he visits New Dehli — would make us India's biggest arms supplier). Likewise, any Afghan deal that allows the Pashtun Taliban to share in power will naturally make Iran all the more intransigent, which signals good things for arms sales to all its enemies — and our allies — across the Persian Gulf region. The Saudis alone just scored about $60 billion in U.S. arms deals.

You know, for a guy who wants to make the world safe from nuclear weapons, Obama sure is spreading a lot of conventional firepower around the planet. Yes, it's a lot nicer to pawn stuff than having to fight yourself, but as the U.S. continues piling up all these side bets in its attempt to win the current pot in Afghanistan, you have to wonder about what future terror strikes and regional conflicts we're actually aiding and abetting. I mean, the Saudis supplied most of the 9/11 attackers and Pakistan is likely to be the primary source for most of the next-9/11 personnel, and yet just look at how our legacy efforts from the War on Terror are yielding so many arms sales to the same two countries. How any of those deals stem future terrorism is best left to the collective imagination, I suppose, but it's worst left ignored.

And the risk factors in the Petraeus gamble don't end there. Assuming the Pakistanis are sufficiently bought off, two more specific scenarios threaten his diplomatic push. As Fred Kaplan has noted at Slate, the Northern Alliance, having put down their arms years ago, may feel the need to re-engage if their hated Pashtun rivals to the south slip into elected positions. Then there's the issue that Dexter Filkins has hinted at in the Times but isn't exactly allowed to say: No one knows how much of the Taliban these men in the "new" talks can actually control, especially given Petraeus's divide-and-conquer tactics. A new breed of young commanders has surfaced in the past three years, and these hotheads don't exactly listen to their elders. Which means that no matter what kind of deal the good general strikes, he'll have plenty more pounding to do.

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